Sigh.
Perplexing.
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West Broadway @ Penn Avenue
About Me
- Ranty
- I am a licensed real estate broker with Century 21 Luger Realty, preservationist, fixer-upper-type-nut, sometimes-landlord, and all-around house-addict. I love everything from Queen Annes to Bungalows to Foursquares to Farmhouses. minneapolisgirlatgmaildotcom is where you can reach me!
5 comments:
You are pining for the old windows? Or just that they are being replaced with cheap ones? I can't get that misty about old windows. I fought the old double hungs in our apartment years ago. They had every conceivable problem. They leaked horribly and sagged. Half of them were impossible to secure and the other half didn't move (our landlord's response was to nail some of them shut). I'm sure you could fix them Ranty but for the rest of us theres Anderson renewal. I am all for salvaging them though. There are a million and one uses for old windows and window glass.
Original windows are -in most cases- FAR superior to replacement windows.
The windows removed from this house have persevered for (I'm guessing) close to 100 years. I'm willing to bet that these replacements will need replacing themselves in under 20. (Vinyl windows cannot be repaired the way wood can - once a seal is broken, the window is done.)
Plus, the embodied energy waste involved in tossing all those windows makes the process decidedly UN-green.
It isn't ungreen if you salvage the windows. I use old window glass for all kinds of stuff. They make great cold frame covers in the garden. Lifehacker blog had a great use for them last week--as attractive white boards, when set against the right background.
Vinyl windows suck that's true. Quality windows are still mostly wood with exterior aluminum cladding. Around my neighborhood, the first thing flippers do after a roof or a furnace replacement (probably code issues) is windows so fixing them must be a lost art, maybe you could educate your fellow flippers about this. Plus, for single glazed there is the whole storm window thing which is probably problematic for landlords. Much easier to just have new ones that don't need to swap out the screens for storm windows.
Oh yeah, I forgot to add that once we got a call from some no name replacement window company and the person actually tried to pitch me on vinyl windows "because they never rot" and told me that wooden windows clad with aluminum were the worst because they "rotted from the inside." They didn't have an answer for me about what happens when vinyl meets the wooden headers and framing and water gets trapped there. A lot harder to fix than a bad sill, I imagine.
Even the NAME vinylite makes me want to gag.
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